How Shakespeare Saved My Life, Folger Theatre

Jacob Ming-Trent has been building a presence on DC stages in the last few years, from a first appearance in the Folger's Midsummer Night's Dream during its run at the National Building Museum in 2022, and then just recently at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Jocelyn Bioh's adaptation of Merry Wives. In the Folger's production of his How Shakespeare Saved My Life, Ming-Trent is telling his own story and using his own formidable stage presence to hold the stage with a solo performance.

He's helped along the way by several things. Under Tony Taccone's direction, Ming-Trent's depiction of numerous other characters are excellently well drawn and distinct, with vocal and physical mannerisms that keep a much needed clarity for the audience. Alexander V. Nichols' projection design also does spectacular work filling out the world on Takeshi Kata's simple set of sliding screens and a single, beautifully painted bench. 

Jacob Ming-Trent in Folger Theatre's world premiere production of How Shakespeare Saved My Life, written and performed by Jacob Ming-Trent and directed by Tony Taccone. On stage at the Folger Shakespeare Library, June 9-July 5, 2026. Photography by Erika Nizborski. 

In Ming-Trent's play, Shakespeare is a force that rushes through, around, and sometimes past his life since first reading a speech aloud in class as a twelve-year old. He demonstrates his prodigious ability to know the plays deeply enough to be able to constantly call them into conversation from that time forward, and stakes a claim from childhood of being a Shakespearan actor as his justification for this well of knowledge. Most fascinatingly, after a sequence rejecting the pressure to play Othello as the role for a black man, there is a brief scene of Ming-Trent in a holding cell with a trans woman who is his voice first for calling out the queer heart of so much of Shakespeare's impassioned dialogue, and also challenges of why he feels such a need to lay claim to this particular playwright who has been so deeply claimed by white culture for centuries. That moment is charged and I wish Ming-Trent's answer was a bit more explored; the whole play is his answer, in one sense, but the clarity of that moment felt particularly welcome and over too soon.

How Shakespeare Saved My Life is also over too soon, closing next weekend on July 5. As we all look at how America was shaped and changed by the actions of colonialists 250 years ago, it's worth a moment to look at Jacob Ming-Trent's story of how his own life was shaped by words from long ago.